The unexpected winner of the AI boom? Your arts degree |
The unexpected winner of the AI boom? Your arts degree
July 24, 2026 — 7:53am
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It sometimes feels like arts degrees are the punching bag of Australian higher education. The connotation of “useless” arts degrees is hard to miss, a view cemented in policy when the Morrison government raised the price of arts degrees to over $50,000 in 2020.
Cheekily titled the “Job-ready Graduates Package”, it hiked arts degrees by 113 per cent to cost the same as commerce and law degrees, even though graduates from the latter fields earn 40 to 70 per cent higher median income five years post-graduation.
However, the recent introduction of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Claude is predicted to disrupt the labour market in multiple ways. Advancing at an incredibly fast pace, they can now write books, build apps, produce life-like images, and much more.
Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark – whose firm developed leading AI chatbot Claude – recently argued that current university students shouldn’t write off arts degrees. He claimed that his English literature degree was “extremely relevant for AI”, and that “knowing the right questions to ask” will be more important than “rote programming” in a post-AI world.
So, will AI really make arts degrees more valuable? The honest........